gallery

Remember that Kodak Photo Gallery online picture service that we didn’t use? It appears that years of shipping packed-in with the company’s cameras have netted it some 75 million users, making it an asset that now-bankrupt Kodak has agreed to sell off to Shutterfly for $23.8 million. The deal isn’t quite done yet, with Shutterfly’s offer entered as a stalking horse bid while other buyers may also submit proposals before the process is targeted to close in the spring. This is all a part of Kodak’s pivot away from digital cameras and related products as it focuses on enterprise services and desktop printers instead. Under the current agreement, current gallery customers uncomfortable with being shipped off to Shutterfly will be able to opt out and either download their stored pics or buy them on DVDs. Otherwise, their accounts will be transferred in a way that is “preserved, and protected” — that is to say, almost entirely unlike the way they’re handled on iOS and Android.

All together now — “Aww!” Marvell has just outed its Classroom 3.0 initiative here at CES 2012, with the star attraction being the cutie above. That’s an Armada-powered plug computer known as SMILE, hailed as the “first plug development kit designed to turn a traditional classroom into a highly interactive learning environment.” The device is capable of creating a “micro cloud” within a classroom, with the entire environment able to be controlled by the instructor. The hardware’s being launched in tandem with an expanded One Laptop Per Child partnership, with the OLPX XO 3.0 trumpeted as the perfect companion product. It’s capable of serving up to 60 clients at once, and it’s based on Arch Linux for ARM; there’s even a 5V Li-ion battery for back-up — you know, in case that rambunctious kid of yours pulls the power. It’ll be hitting kiddies and teachers alike this Spring, but there’s nary a mention of price.

Pat LaFrieda, the master butcher and man behind the best burgers in the world, has created an iPad app that’s pretty much the definitive guide to all things meat. Aptly named Pat LaFrieda’s Big App for Meat, you’ll learn about all the cuts and dry aging and grinding techniques with awesome visuals and in-depth videos.

LaFrieda really knows his meat too, he supplies Shake Shack and Minetta Tavern with the most delicious burger patties known to man, so his advice is like canon in the meat world. The app, which is super slick, is deliciously visual, you’ve never seen meat like this before. Each cut of meat (and it details cuts from beef, pork, poultry, veal and lamb) comes with a real life gallery with amazing pictures, a little blurb on the cut, a location of where it can be found on the animal and a 360 degree view.

What’s also great about Pat LaFrieda’s Big App for Meat is how much video content there is. From teaching you Steaks 101 to learning about dry aging to discovering how to grind meat and sharpen knives, LaFrieda himself reveals his secrets. There’s even a fun meat quiz to test yourself on! If you love meat, and I totally expect you to, you’re going to learn everything you need to know. If you’re a vegetarian, I’m sorry. $7 [iTunes]

The Kindle Fire is has started to ship and w’re hearing about the thousands of apps which will work on the customized Android tablet, including Facebook, Pandora, Netflix, Angry Birds, Zynga, Hulu Plus and ESPN ScoreCenter. Today, real estate search platforms Trulia and Zillow are both launching dedicated apps for the Kindle Fire.

Trulia’s new tablet app will leverage Kindle Fire’s extra-wide viewing angle, and will focus on list-view, photo search and full-screen slideshows. Unlike the site’s other mobile apps, this will not be a map-based app.

With the app you can personalize your apartment or home search by setting filters and search parameters, use photo gallery search to view property slideshows on the tablet’s entire screen, save searches to your account, and contact the listing agent to get more details or schedule a showing.

Similarly, Zillow’s app, which is map-based, allows you to search a database of nearly 100 million homes, view homes for sale, homes for rent and recently sold homes, filter by home type, listing type, home size, beds, baths, and price, view full-screen photos, and save favorite homes and searches.

Blockbuster? We knew it was dying, courtesy Redbox, Netflix and the changing ways people consume their entertainment, but when will it finally expire? Probably next year, according to one analyst and the company’s own balance sheet. Updated.

While the remaining 6,000 stores is nothing to sneeze at (my late hometown one not amongst them), there is precedence for massive, simultaneous closures in rival Movie Gallery. That company had 2,400 stores, you see, and it shuttered them all back in February.

Ending on a positive note, the company could have a Redbox/Netflix hybrid future with its existing supermarket kiosks and mail service. So here’s hoping that happens, some people can keep their jobs, and Blockbuster’s predicted “demise” in 2011 is merely a metamorphosis into something a bit leaner and meaner. Competition is good, and all that.

Update: Reader Josh writes in with an additional bit of depressing news for Blockbuster:

[W]hen considering the future of Blockbuster kiosks, Blockbuster doesn’t actually own any of kiosks. NCR owns and operates all of them. Blockbuster just gets a small licensing royalty for them. So, Blockbuster definitely doesn’t have a chance at sustaining itself on those kiosks.

At Engadget HQ, we takegreatcare not to trumpet the claims of a web survey, as it’s always difficult to tell who’s actually doing the surveying — and even if we could, consumer surveys are all about a “what if” that may never actually come to pass. That said, it looks like maybe ABC is conducting a study asking folks whether they’d be interested in a subscription to an ABC.com streaming video service, and maybe that service might have a wide variety ABC shows, past and present, fully on-demand. Sound familiar? Interestingly, the subscription would seem to be offered alongside the existing free service, and both paid and free would have advertising, though reduced by 20 percent for those coughing up the fee. You can find a list of potentially potential shows included in the gallery below, forwarded to us by an anonymous tipster; we tried to take the survey ourselves, but were promptly rejected for our love of FlashForward.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.